Daily Reflections

In an age when machines can produce, create, and problem-solve, we anxiously ask: what work is left for us? The answer may be found not in acquiring new skills to stay ahead of automation, but in uncovering what was always there.

The gold the alchemists sought was not something to be manufactured but something to be revealed. The dross — the heavy, obscuring layers — must be burned away. What remains is incorruptible.

Your deepest work is not the job that can be automated. It is the uncovering of what you truly are beneath the layers of conditioning, fear, and false identity. This work cannot be delegated to machines because machines cannot do the work of self-revelation. Only you can burn away your own dross.

You did not choose this change. It was imposed upon you by circumstances beyond your control — job eliminated, relationship ended, health shattered, world transformed.

The teachings do not deny your pain. They do not minimize your loss. But they offer a reframe: what if this dissolution is not merely destruction but the necessary precondition for something new?

The alchemists called it the nigredo — the blackening, the reduction to formless matter. It feels like death because it is a kind of death. The old form must dissolve before the new can emerge.

You are in the dark stage of the work. The task is not to escape it but to trust it. Not to pretend it isn't dark, but to remember that every dawn is preceded by night.

The feeling of meaninglessness is not a sign that you have failed. It may be a sign that you have outgrown the meanings you were given — that the container has become too small for what you're becoming.

When the old meanings collapse, there is a void. The temptation is to fill it quickly with any meaning that offers itself — a new ideology, a new distraction, a new project. But the void has its own teaching.

The mystics called this the via negativa — the negative way. When all the positive content is stripped away, something remains that cannot be stripped away. When all the constructed meanings dissolve, the ground of meaning is revealed.

You are not separate from the meaning you seek. Your very consciousness is the universe becoming aware of itself. Your experience — even this experience of meaninglessness — is the Divine experiencing itself through you.